STiR coffee and tea magazine

STiR coffee and tea 33 By John Snell M any believe that tea should deliver more, which would require it to cost more than it's currently sold for, at least for most teas on the marketplace. This assumes that a redistribution of margin is not in the cards. Some will point out that loose teas are bought and sold at much higher prices than many of the teabag grades, but this does not exempt analy- sis to see whether this portion of production, sold at said rates, does indeed keep all involved in its making supplied with a living income, without whom tea doesn't exist. You may ask yourself, where does the responsibility stop, should I be a buyer of one type of tea but not the other? Contractually and ethically, there is a good case to say that as long as your purchase price delivers a living income after all inputs and intermediary costs, then you have delivered on this most important of foundational principles: that of commercial sustainability for farmers and other workers. However, there is more than individual responsibility at stake. If a produc- er is engaged in selling 20% of his crop at a profit and 80% of it at a loss then, irrespective of the fact that you are one of the purchasers of the top 20%, the business may not actually provide for the tea makers. This reality is not your personal responsibility, but it is rather one of commodity economics. These cannot and should not be manipulated, sometimes the demand-supply equa- tion informs and demands a change of direction from farmer and producers. The fact that a particular market may buy certain grades from a tea origin but others may be procured internally or by other international markets makes it impractical for a consuming origin to take responsibility for the health of The retail price of teabags continues to rise while the quality and price paid to farmers continues to decline. Perspective: How Much Should Tea Cost? an origin's industry. However, the major players in these tea destinations can and should ensure that what they procure and sell to their consumers is based on a fair return to all those within the sup- ply chain. How to Assess the Ideal Cost of Tea? So what is the best way to assess how much tea should cost? The steps start with a ramping-up of all costs associated with the production and delivery of that product. In this vein, working with a small tea grower company in India, Iron Kettle's "Commitment to Small Tea Growers and Fine Leaf Tea" (iron-ket- tle.com) we at tea consultancy NMTeaB have been working on a living case study to try and change the conversation. It starts with irrefutable proof: the price of green leaf paid to farmers and the total value of leaf procured over a season, all manageable through the insistence that every farmer has a bank account, which is not a given in many grow- ing regions in the world.

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